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August 19, 2021 – Lentech staff have been supporting the ongoing operations and maintenance of the NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for many years. On June 13th, HST ceased doing science due to a failure in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling subsystem. The Hubble Mission Operations team, which includes Lentech responded to the anomaly. NASA established a HST Anomaly Resolution Tiger Team to investigate the malfunction and determine the most safe and effective way to resume operations. The Tiger Team included Lentech employees Dr. Ed Cheung and Art Rankin. After a month of investigation and testing, on July 15th the Mission Operations team, including Lentech employees Moji Abedin, Madison Brodnax, Hannah Daelemans, and HST Chief Engineer Larry Dunham took HST into a hardware safehold and reconfigured to redundant hardware before recovering HST to fully resume science operations.
On August 18, NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen and GSFC Center Director, Dennis Andrucyk came to the HST Control Center to personally thank the HST Mission Operations team and the Tiger team that supported the effort. They expressed their admiration for the team and talked about the legacy of HST as the flagship mission for NASA’s exploration of the universe.
“Larry Dunham and his team have done an outstanding job keeping a national asset like Hubble safe and operational”, said Lentech’s President, Gregg Einfalt. “We are extremely proud to be a part of the HST team and represented by a group of dedicated engineers that continually step up when called upon.”